: An Essay on Criticis by Graham Hough

II. Mimesis. i.

39. In the general sense ‘literature’ can mean almost any kind of recorded
discourse, from patent-medicine advertisements and the propaganda of
obscure sects (“free literature on request”) to works of scholarship and
science. In the special sense (the one employed here) few of these are
literature. To distinguish the special sense we sometimes qualify the word
and say ‘imaginative literature’; and much traditional criticism simply uses
the word ‘poetry’, not confining the sense to what is written in verse.

40. The criterion for distinguishing ‘literature’, ‘imaginative literature’, or

‘poetry’ from other forms of discourse was rather uncertainly suggested by
Aristotle: he says it is the ‘mimetic quality’ (Poetics, I), that is to say the
fictitious quality. The point is not, or ought not to be, that literature ‘imitates’
objects in the real world: so does scientific and historical writing. The point
is that literature creates fictitious objects. Gibbon’s presentation of Marcus
Aurelius affirms something about events that have taken place in the real
world. It says that certain things were the case. Shakespeare‘s
presentation of Othello makes no such affirmations. Othello exists only in
the play that bears his name. There is no specific external reality with which
to compare him. This truth has been only intermittently realised and at
some periods has been obscured altogether. It has been stated with the
most compendious clarity by Sidney: “The poet nothing affirmeth, and
therefore never lies”. The frequent obliteration of this distinction can be
excused. because there is a large twilight area and there are many doubtful
casec. The novel in particular is one of these special cases. And the whole
discussion about imitation is in a muddle from its initial formulation in Plato
and Aristotle. Plato disapproves of poetry because it is ‘imitation’ and not
the real thing. ‘Poiesis’ in Greek =- both ‘making’ and ‘poetry‘. But the poet
does not really ‘make’ what he presents. The artisan makes real beds, bits
and bridles; the poet only makes descriptive imitations of them: i.e. the poet
is only a maker in a secondary sense. Plato is concerned about this in Rep.
X ; more concerned than is necessary, it may seem to us; and he would
probably not have been if poiesis had not had this dual meaning. However,
we can agree that the point is established; in this sense poetry is an
imitation or mimesis. Then Aristotle, in Poetics , proceeds to make this
‘mimetic quality’ the distinguishing characteristic of the fine arts (painting,
music, drama, dancing, etc.). In particular he makes it the distinction
between poetry (‘imaginative literature’) and other kinds of discourse,
historical and scientific, that may look like it, But this will not do, unless we
now take ‘mimesis’ in a different sense. For the historian ‘imitates’ persons
and events as much as the poet; the distinction is that the objects of the
historian’s imitation have actually occurred, and those of the poet’s have
not. The ‘mimetic quality’ that distinguishes poetry from history is clearly not
the imitative but the fictional, imaginary quality. This must surely be what
Artistotle means. The distinguishing characteristic of literature is that it is
fiction, not a record of fact. Equally with the poets, the historians and
certain kinds of scientists make descriptive ‘imitations’ of objects in the real
world. Yet their imitations are of a different kind. The historian or the
scientific writer makes imitations of objects that have or have had a
substantial existence; and his imitations are invalidated if they do not
correspond to the actuality. The poet is not tied to any such
correspondence. Homer ‘imitates’ the shield of Achilles though no such
shield has ever existed.

41. Yet the ‘imitations’ of the poet, though not of specific objects with a
substantial, historical existence are not cut off from the real world.
Shakespeare’s Othello is not an ‘imitation’ of an actual man who has
actually existed, as Gibbon’s Marcus Aurelius is. But he is an imitation of a
man. Achilles’ shield in Homer is not an imitation of any shield that has ever
existed; but it is an imitation of a shield. So, there is a sense in which the
poet is a maker: he makes things that have never existed before. Yet he is
also an imitator: he makes them by analogy with things that have existed.

42. Literature is significant fiction, an imaginary presentation that has

nevertheless some meaningful relation with the real world. This is not a
very recondite idea, but it seems to have been difficult to hold it steadily in
the mind. Reactions to it have been various. We have been told that poetry
is all lies; that it expresses the pro- foundest truths; that the poet nothing
affirmeth and therefore never lies. We have been told that poetry
represents what ought to be not what has been; and we have the popular
notion of ‘poetic licence’-that the poet has a special permit to say things
that are not strictly true. These are all attempts to define the ambiguous
status of poetry; and Sidney’s is by far the most luminous.

43. This dual state-free invention on the one hand and imitation on the
other-is the mode of existence of literature. It has perhaps been best
indicated by Baumgarten, who says that the world created by literature is a
‘heterocosm’, another world, related to the real world by analogy.

XVII. The Novel and History

117. Are there any grounds for considering the novel a special case, for
believing it to be related to reality in a special way? No critical theory ought
to postulate anomalies unnecessarily. But each literary kind is in some way
a special case. If it were not we should not be able to distinguish it. It is
precisely its relation to reality that constitutes the speciality of the novel.
This is a fundamental sort of distinction, and it seems to set the novel apart
from most of the traditional kinds comedy, tragedy, heroic poetry and
pastoral. This sense of its peculiar position is intensified by its enormous
predominance in modern literature. By far the greatest number of
imaginative works now produced are novels. We should not on that
account be tempted, as many modern readers are, to extend the standards
relevant to the novel to literature in general. The novel is only one band in
the whole literary spectrum. Other kinds-tragedy, comedy, heroic  poetry,
pastoral-are distinguished by each dealing with a special area of human
experience. The novel cannot be distinguished in this way. It covers all
these areas. There can be tragic novels and comic novels. We are even
inclined to speak loosely of a particular novel as ‘a tragedy’ or ‘a comedy of
manners’. We know that it is a novel all the same. and that it is constituted
as a novel, not by dealing with any special area of experience, but by a
special way of presenting reality.
118. The novel is a fictional prose narrative, but we need to distinguish it
further. The romance is also a fictional narrative, and it may be in prose;
but we feel it to be distinct from the novel. Our sense of ‘the way things
happen’, as Henry James puts it, is not involved in the romance, which may
deal in magic, or at least has characters who are in some degree
emancipated from the necessities of time and space and social
circumstance. In the novel the characters are subject to these necessities
The novel may include romance elements; but in so far as it does (The
Scarlet Letter, Le Grand Meaulnes) we feel it to diverge from the central
tradition of the novel.

Other forms are differently constituted. Tradegy can include a theophany or

a deus ex machina, or be motivated by a ghost or start from a situation
inherently improbable or fantastic. Comedy can have a magical or quasi-
magical denouement, and deals in impossible disguises, mistaken
identities, etc. Heroic poetry has supernatural machinery, and heroes who
are helped and hindered by deities and spirits. Pastoral represents a world
that is confessedly visionary. The novel is obliged to represent life on the
terms on which it is actually lived; its only parallel in this respect being
realistic drama, which occupies a relatively small part in the total history of
drama, and is largely an offshoot of the novel.

119. Not only is the novel bound by the laws of everyday pro- bability, as
no other form is, but it typically proceeds to bind itself further-to a particular
time and a particular place. A novel is set in Moscow in 1812, in the Home
Counties during the Napoleonic Wars, in Paris under Louis Phillippe, in
New York in the eighteen- nineties. And these settings are not merely
incidental, because a novel has to be set somewhere; they are a vital part
of the sub- stance of the work. When Shakespeare sets his Two
Gentlemen in Verona this commits him to nothing; there is nothing to
differentiate Verona from any other place and the time is indeterminate.
When Stendhal sets Lucien Leuwen first in Nancy, then in Paris during the
July monarchy he is committing himself to representing a verifiable external
reality-the provincial nobility, then the political and official class of the
capital, at a particular moment in their destiny. He is in fact committing
himself to history. The extent to which novels incorporate political and
social history varies greatly, but they  all do incorporate it. So all novels are
in part historical novels, and part of the characteristic method of the novel is
historical. Our way of talking about novels as though they were poetry,
neglecting the historical discussion, is inadequate.

120. Are we then to judge a novel by the truth or otherwise of its historical
representation? In part, yes. We certainly do so. The main reason that
Scott’s novels of 18th century Scotland are superior to his medieval novels
is that in the first he is presenting a phase of history that he knows and
intimately understands, while in the second he gives us only a fancy
picture. In the novels of recent Scottish history he has simply a more
substantial truth to tell us. It may be said that these are overtly historical
novels and so are atypical. But the same considerations apply to novels of
con- temporary life. A large  part of the superiority of The Rainbow to
Kangaroo is that The Rainbow presents (among other things) a real stage
in the social evolution of the English provinces, while Karigaroo is only a
socio-political fantasy. The Zionist plot oDaniel Deronda is of the same
nature as Kangaroo; and its social unreality is the more marked as it lies
side by side with the Gwendolen Harleth plot, of great power and
authenticity.

121. We should be wrong however to judge a novel by the amount of social

and historical reality that it incorporates. It is not a quantitative matter. The
novelist is perfectly free to make his own selection from the available social
and historical material, and it may be a narrow one. We do not ask in
reading Jane Austen “But where are the lower classes?” Or if we do we are
foolish. Jane Austen tells the truth about a certain segment of the middle
class of her time, from the viewpoint of a woman who herself belongs to
that class. And it is enough. If we want to we can deduce a great deal from
what the presented material tells us about social areas of which she tells us
little or nothing. If we want to see how much more could have been put in
we can turn to George Eliot; but George Eliot is not to be preferred on that
account. On the other hand the social and political content of a novel
cannot be attenuated beyond a certain point without risk. There is no law
forbidding James to present the characters in The Goldeir as living in a
vacuum. But he has imperilled his  success by doing so. The single
remaining tap-root to social reality is the American-European imbroglio; and
it is probably too slight.

122. How do we judge the historical truthfulness of a novel? In the first

place we bring to bear any external information we may have; and, as
Henry James suggests, we must bring to bear any information that we
cannot help having. With the great novelists of the past, Balzac, Dickens,
Tolstoy, this has generally been done for us, and we know pretty well, from
particular researches or common consent, their relation to the historical
actuality of the times they portray. But l’exactitude n’est pas la verite‘
(Matisse). Dickens can confuse two poor laws. and generally conflate the
world of his youth with the world of his maturity; and the truthfulness
required of him does not suffer much. Yet the demand for other exactitudes
is absolute. He could not, for example, be allowed to put the Bank at Hyde
Park Corner. A novelist may be allowed to invent a provincial town, but not
a capital; London must be London and Paris Paris. He may invent a Prime
Minister; but the political parties must be substantially the ones existing at
the time. Class relations, in the superficial sense as well as in the pro-
founder one, must be got right. A novel set in the present which used the
class manners of a time even so recent as 1930 would seem hopelessly
inauthentic. These observations are trivial, and selected at random; but
they point to a multiplicity of threads linking the novel to specific

external realities. No other literary kind has them in such numbers. On the
other hand the novel includes more of the merely contingent, the
accidental, than any other literary kind; and this has worried some
scrupulous souls. “How to get over, how to escape from, the besotting
parti- cularity of fiction. ‘Roland approached the house; it had a green door
and window-blinds; and there was a scraper on the upper step.’ To hell with
Roland and the scraper.”l “It was this particularity that disgusted Paul
Valery with fiction. He could not induce himself to write: ‘The Marquise
arrived at nine’, when she might equally well have been a Comtesse, and
might equally well have arrived later.”2 But perhaps this is not on the other
hand; perhaps it is part of the same situation as the historical specificity of
the novel. The green door and the scraper must be such as that kind of
house would have had at that particular period; perhaps nine o’clock was
the proper time to arrive at a party in the society that this particular novel
describes, or perhaps it was significantly late or early. The novel presents a
particular society at a particular time, and it is committed to presenting
many things as they actually are or were; and much of its contingent detail
is of a confirmatory nature, providing what James called ‘density of
specification’. Some of the greatest novelists (Balzac, Dickens) are
particularly rich in such detail; some (Jane Austen, Henry James) largely
dispense with it. But if they dispense with it they must, so far as they are
successful, rely on moral particularities that conduce to the same effect.
From the formal point of view historical particulars are as contingent as the
invented particulars like the green door and the scraper. There can be no
reason internal to the novel that the Bank is in the City and not at Hyde
Park Corner. It simply happens to be the case, and this is one of the cases
that the novelist has to present as it is. We can view the historical ties of
the novel therefore in two ways. One, an honorific one, is that it reveals the
movement of history in vividly realised concrete examples. The other, often
seen pejoratively, is that it is shackled by a multiplicity of accidental details.
But it is probable that the second is only an aspect of the first.

124. Poetry for Aristotle is more philosophical than history because history
deals only with the contingent facts. The con- tingent facts can only
become part of the universal, Tu KaBahou, by being subjected to some
degree of manipulation. Poetry is very free in its manipulation of contingent
facts; the novel seems to be a sort of half-way house-partly tied to historical
actuality and partly outside it. The kind of poetry that presents large
numbers of contingent facts is mostly recent, and in the light of the whole
history of poetry, somewhat anomalous. Poetry in general tends to evade
the specific, accidental, historic fact by periphrasis or allusiveness. The
Waste Land and Hugh Sehyn Mauberley are both (among other things)
about London; they present many specific places, some historical
characters, and numerous faits divers. They are unusual among poems in
doing this; but this is the normal procedure of the novel. In Eliot’s later
poetry he reverts to the more usual practice of concealing or suppressing
the contingent facts. The third section of Burnt Norton is set in the London
Underground; and it has been revealed to us that the actual locale that
suggested the imagery was Gloucester Road Station.’ But this is not
mentioned in the poem. In a novel it would have been, and Gloucester
Road would rejoice to be Gloucester Road

125. Any criticism of the novel which neglects its ties with historical
actuality is false to the novel’s real values, and empty when it should be
full. Arnold Kettle has said: “ Wuthering Heights is about England in 1847.
The people it reveals live not in a never-never land but in Yorkshire.
Heathcliff was born not in the pages of Byron but in a Liverpool slum. The
story of Wuthering Heights is concerned not with love in the abstract but
with the passions of living people, with property-ownership, the attraction of
social comfort, the arrangement of marriages, the importance of education,
the validity of religion, the relations of rich and poor.” Mr. Kettle is right. And
for him there is no question of history’s being less philosophical than
poetry; for he is a Marxist and history is a providential scheme. For the
socialist-realist the supreme value of the novel is that it presents, with the
maximum of concreteness and particularity, the forces universally at work
in history. Those who do not believe that history is directed by universal
forces, or do not believe that it is directed at all, must still however believe
that certain limited and specific trends are observable in it. over limited
periods. And even to them a large part of the virtue of the novel must be its
revelation of historical truth. Can we imagine a novel that was entirely false
to historical and social reality and was yet a coherent and self-consistent
work of art? No: if there were such a thing we should not it a novel but a
fantasy or a romance. And we should then properly say not that it was false
to reality, but that it was unrelated to any specific reality, even though it
used local and historical names.

126. It must be admitted that literary critics often derive their information
about historical situations almost entirely from works of fiction; and in
talking about the truthfulness of such works are often therefore arguing in a
circle. Are they therefore talking nonsense? Not necessarily. A truthful
picture often reveals itself as such by its coherence. We know, say, from
external evidence that the setting and certain circumstances of a particular
novel are drawn from history. And we know at least something about the
history. The novelist tells the fuller kind of historical truth that is his
business by showing what kind of people must have lived in this world,
what kind of motives would have been at work in it, what their
consequences will be. Besides being a report on social reality the novel is a
formal construction, and historical falsity in the novel will often reveal itself
as internal contradiction. Mr. Verver in The Goldeti Bowl is a self-made
American millionaire of a period when such a fortune as his could only have
been made by ruthlessly acquisitive methods. Yet he is presented as a
gentle, unworldly old man; and he has been seen by some of James’s
critics as a type of beneficent Providence. We can say if we like that Mr.
Verver is not like any possible American millionaire of that time, and that
James’s fiction here, as often in his later writing, seems to be cutting itself
loose from social actuality altogether. But without calling on the external
resources of social history we can say (perhaps preferably) that the
presentation of Mr. Verver’s character within the novel is inconsistent and
self-contradictory. James does in fact show him as ruthlessly acquisitive,
from the beginning when we hear about his art-collection, (which includes a
human being, the Prince) to the end, when he is seen leading his wife away
to captivity in American City. Yet all the resources of authorial suggestion
are employed to present him as a gentle unworldly old man. And the two
sides of the picture do not match Internal inconsistencies (e.g. the
invincible refinement of Oliver Twist in spite of the surroundings in which he
has been brought up) may point to an unwillingness on the author’s part to
face certain social realities. It may be enough for the critic’s purpose to
point to the internal inconsistencies. But I think we should feel that the critic
too was avoiding certain

127. The Marxists are right in laying stress on the function of the novel in
revealing historical reality; but they are not exclusively right. It is the
speciality of the novel to present its characters enmeshed in social
circumstances, living in history, not in an imaginary extra-historical world.
But the novel also deals with the attempts of human beings to escape from
history and social circumstance. On Marxist theory these attempts must
always fail, and novels which show them as succeeding are not telling the
truth. The Marxist critic has to qualify his admiration of many traditional
novels when he gets to the end and finds the hero slipping through his
fingers-by living happily ever after, or being credited with some unearned
spiritual victory. He is often right. Cf. Arnold Kettle on The Portrait of a
Lady: “Many besides Isabel Archer believe that they can buy themselves
out of the crudities through the means of a high-grade consciousness and a
few thousand pounds” .But there is a mechanical inevitability about the
repetition of such judgments which suggests that they are there to enforce
a doctrine rather than to do justice to the nature of the novel. Leaving aside
the private opinions of novelists, critics or readers, the novel as a form quite
evidently believes that human beings are to a limited degree able to free
themselves from history and social circumstance. The links with historical
reality are generally strongest on the setting and the minor characters,
weakest on the hero and heroine. Heroes are by definition those who
struggle to transcend circumstance, and in the novel they sometimes
succeed, as they sometimes do in life. The frequency of the theme of
courtship in the novel is genetically a legacy from comedy and medieval
romance; but it survives for another reason-because love is, for a time, a
way out of history and social circumstance; and the novel chooses to make
it an absolute, by stopping at the moment of fulfilment. In other novels
(though not generally English ones) the hero may be seeking neither social
nor erotic fulfilment, but the salvation of his soul. And this is something that
must start within history and the social order, but must end outside it.

128. We return to the point from which we started. All novels are historical
novels; history is the field in which the novel operates. In bad novels false
claims to spiritual freedom (caprice or mere wish-fulfilment) are shown as
annulling history. In good novels either history remains absolute, as in
realist and naturalist fiction; or history remains the gound, never denied; but
an authentic spiritual freedom is presented, in flashes and glimpses, which
is as far as the novel can go, transcending history and society.

Other literary kinds may explore more fully and more intensely the farthest
reaches of imaginative experience. But the novel remains closest to our
sublunary course. Hence its continuing power.

In the Shadow of a Dome

 Pale yellow light lingering, sea grey clouds,
The shrinking river glistening under low
Bridges as it mirrors the sunset,
The light fading through the triple arches
Of the Ponte Vecchio till the bridge
Of old shops darkens to a silhouette,
How shall I store all this and more that comes?
I look down on the submerged city
And lamps spring up along the embankment.
Softly washed by hidden floodlights
Old buildings I have explored start to glow,
Palaces, towers and quattrocento domes.
Your citizens know how to show YOU off,
Old Lion! When buildings glowed long ago
It was in the flames of burning houses,
And once, within the cathedral walls,
When the bells chimed assassins struck,
But tonight the city is untroubled,
And from this hill the great, brick cupola
Of Santa Maria del Fiore sits
Like a melon in a basket of leaves.
In the rhythm of this dome, from which tonight
Spreads such peace, is a riddle that shall send
One who has walked in its shadow questing.
Like a Florentine I shall grieve for it,
As for a lost friend, when I have gone away:
A spire takes flight but a dome blesses the earth.
ROSEMARY JOSEPH